A common stereotype of Americans is that we believe in rugged individualism and
competition, and want nothing to do with radical notions of social change. And
the most rugged individualist, conservative Americans were supposedly farmers
from places like Nebraska and Kansas back before the turn of the century.

An excellent book, The Populist Response to Industrial
America, by Norman Pollack (Harvard University Press, 1962) puts quite a
different light on this topic. Pollack dug into libraries in Kansas, Nebraska,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin to see what the newspapers serving farm communities
were saying during the 1890's. He found that people in these communities saw
capitalism as an attack on their values.

The Farmers Alliance of Lincoln, Nebraska wrote, "The
plutocracy of to-day is the logical result of the individual freedom which we
have always considered the pride of our system...The tendency of the competitive
system is to antagonize and disassociate men... The survival of the fittest is a
satanic creed... A stage must be reached in which each will be for all and all
for each. The welfare of the individual must be the object and end of all
effort... Competition is only another name for war...[W]ithout a complete
eradication of this system the people cannot for once hope for relief of a
permanent character." Three years later, under its new name,
Alliance-Independent, it wrote, "A reigning plutocracy with the masses
enslaved, is the natural development and end of individualism....The only
possible permanent democracy is the democracy of unselfish socialism."

A Walnut Grove, Minnesota paper wrote, "The calamities that have
heretofore and that now are upon us—as a nation—are but the measure or indicator
of the extent that the standard of political and economic equality has been
departed from in the practice of the competitive system."

The Platte County Argus described the "so-called great
men" who rose to the top in the competition for the survival of the fittest as
"moral cowards and public plunderers [who have] reversed the code of morals and
stand up like hypocrites of olden times and thank god they are not like other
men are...."

The Topeka Advocate wrote, "Look at the multitudes who
have been but recently thrown out of employment, and whose families have been
destitute in consequence...It is cruel, it is inhuman, to attribute these
conditions to laziness, drunkenness and incompetence. They are the natural
product of a false and vicious system by which the few grow rich beyond all
human need, and the many are doomed to eternal poverty and want...Remember that
tramps are men, and that they are a natural product of our social system. There
must be discovered some way to deal with them consistently with these facts. Can
it be done without a revolution of our system? We think not."

In calling for revolution against the plutocrats, we in New
Democracy are not turning our backs on the historic values of ordinary
Americans. We are rediscovering them.

Originally published in New Democracy Newsletter,
January-February 1999.